Hair Removal Techniques, Creams, Wax, Devices
DermaMarine Wax Strips
DermaMarine works on the same theory as other hair-yanking devices do. The basic principle is to have something grab a hold of the hairs in relatively large groups, and then to yank that hair clear of the follicle. That gives you a much longer "smooth time" when compared to shaving, since the hair now has to regrow from scratch to reach the surface, never mind to grow out from the surface. When you shave, you are only cutting the hair down to surface level so the next day, literally, it is poking out again.
Where DermaMarine does better than some of its neighbors (say the NADS gel system) is that it has a nice combination of cloth and wax. You start with a pre-packaged pair of cloth strips, wax sides facing each other. You warm those strips between your hands. We find that pressing them to the side of a hot cup of coffee / water works quite nicely too. You then peel the two strips apart from each other and press both on your leg.
The trick here is that the hot wax cools quickly - grabbing hold of the hair, but NOT the skin. The wax isn't hot enough to hurt your leg at all, so there's no pain at this stage. Now it's a matter of yanking the hair out of your hair follicles. You hold the skin tight, and in a quick motion you RIP the cloth up, taking the hair with it.
Now I won't pretend that this is painless. Just as with any hair-yanking technique, there is pain. But I *do* have to say that it is far, far better than NADS and other similar systems. NADS seems to take up skin as well as hair, it is indiscriminately sticky. In comparison, the DermaMarine wax, once it cools, does a great job of NOT sticking to the skin. ALL it sticks to is the hair. All it yanks out is the hair.
I did an experiment where I did my left leg with DermaMarine and shaved my right leg. The DermaMarine did not get all the hairs - it left stragglers, which I left in place to make my comparison fair. After a week, the right / shaved leg was back to about 1/8" long hairs. On the left leg, the pulled hairs had hardly made it back to the surface, they were barely poking up above the surface.
It's important to note here that hair grows in cycles. You don't have "all hair fully out" on your leg at any point in time. Some of your hair is "long" but some has fallen out and the follicle is temporarily dormant - some will be in the barely-starting-to-grow stage. So in essence, even if you ripped out EVERY hair that was above the surface, you would not get all hair follicles. A fair number of hairs on your leg would be either in the dormant stage or have hairs that were not yet at the surface.
So that being said, it could very well be that the hairs I now see on my left leg that are poking up over the surface aren't even the hairs I yanked out. They could be the "other follicles" that were completely unaffected by my yanking.
That being said, the difference between the shaved side and DermaMarined side is pretty clear. If I then DermaMarine in another 2 weeks - i.e. when the remaining hairs on my left leg have grown out to the required 1/4" length - I will have gotten pretty much all hair in all cycles. So it gets good points as far as results. The new hair that grows is "fresh" hair - i.e. pointy end, soft. So it's much better looking than hair that's been cut in the middle (i.e. by a razor) which looks thick and stubbly. On the down side, DermaMarine isn't cheap - it costs a lot more than razors do. And there's some pain involved here. It's up to you to decide if that trade-off is worth it, but I'm considering making this my summertime hair solution.
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